Reflection on my visit to St Mark’s Maquoketa—16 March 2014

I took the opportunity of coming to St Mark’s to preside at the celebration of new ministry with the arrival of Fr Bob North from the Diocese of Chicago as their new priest in residence. The Warden said that it has been more than twenty years since the congregation had celebrated a new ministry. I stressed that it was a ministry with and among rather than for, and that Fr Bob had actually given us a new liturgy to use in these circumstances where a congregation receives a priest who is not going to be their rector. It was a simple adaptation of celebration of new ministry, and the enthusiasm of the congregation helped us see the importance of marking such an occasion.

The people of St Mark’s Maquoketa have made some distinctive choices in the past few years. They decided to demolish their rectory that stood next door, and built a large community center on the spot, which now serves the whole town. Several weeks ago they held their annual Shrove Tuesday meal in which they serve noodles instead of pancakes. The high estimate of meals served was put at 450 people! Prior to the building of the center, the congregation gave their sanctuary over to a local youth choir for regular practice. Some might remember the evening that they came to Diocesan Convention and sang at the convention banquet.

As I looked over the church registry, this is a congregation of 10-12 people on a Sunday, and yet they have made bold decisions which reflect their desire to be of service and to remain vital and visible in the community. It was very clear how much they loved Kent Anderson, the priest who has been coming to them a couple of times a month these past few years, but the strength of their community comes from one another, especially their long-serving worship leaders and their wardens. They had also obviously maintained good ecumenical connections or perhaps that is the nature of Maquoketa, but among the clergy present were pastors from the United Methodist Church, the ELCA, the UCC and a Roman Catholic Deacon who read the Gospel. Bob is committed to pastoral care, but also sees his role as leading from the front beyond the church walls. His connection with Bishop Peni in Nzara is certainly going to have some influence on the shape of ministry and mission at St Mark’s, I am sure. [Note: click here to read Fr Bob's blog of his time in Nzara.] The other gift to the community is going to be Karen North. This was a celebration when it was very fitting to bring priest and family before the people for welcoming.

My only regret from combining the celebration with the visitation was that there did not seem to be time or opportunity for the actual visit part of things. It is good to recognize that there is a difference! Maybe we can come together for an afternoon chat during my visit to Anamosa in August. It will be interesting at that time to see how they are doing in making room for each other and shaping that shared mission which is theirs and God’s.  

Sermon at St Mark’s Episcopal Church, Maquoketa, 16 March 2014           

(16 March 2014: Celebration of New Ministry – Num. 11: 16-17, 24-25; Romans 12: 1-8; John 15: 9-16)

We make a lot of promises today. First, let me note that it has been a long time since we have celebrated new ministry at St Mark’s in quite this way. Nevertheless I count your dedication of the new community hall some years back as evidence of new ministry and especially the courageous and far-sighted decision to pull down the rectory and build such a bold enterprise. You were thinking about your neighbors and how best to serve them. It was an iconic decision. It was a statement about wanting to be outward-looking. And when I think back to your housing the children’s choir that sang at Convention one year, it is clear that you have always been this way. The community salutes you in recognition as we witness the fine number of ecumenical participants in today’s service. 

Neither is this new ministry for Bob North. What is new is your ministry together, and that we are  delighted to celebrate. Bob, too, is outward-looking; you only have to have followed his passion for ministry in the South Sudan, shared too by his wife Karen and her love for children, to know that you share the desire to be outward-looking. And so Fr Bob’s ministry letter indicates an intention to lead in evangelistic efforts, as well as pastoral care. There is an urgency in this promise. There is also an invitation to shared action, for Fr Bob does not expect to be “doing for” but to be doing “with and among” you all.

“For” and “with and among” are key prepositions; key for the deterring shape of your common life, and key for understanding the Scriptures chosen to mark this day, as they remind you of your calling and identity moving forward.

Vocations are God’s interest and business, not volunteers. And so I invite you to discover and embrace your giftedness in Christ, and shape your ministry accordingly. This is the promise of the Scriptures. First, we promise to work together. In Numbers we find that even Moses could not do it alone. Nor did he fully know it. His father in law, Jethro, in another version of this scene devised the plan for Moses to avoid burn out. God devised the plan—choose seventy, bring them into the tent where we meet, and stand back.

The promise is that if we listen to reason and inspiration, God will provide what we need to be able to do God’s work. Seems only fair; and so the Spirit comes.

The second promise is that—as long as we learn to honor one another’s abilities and not seek to fill out a volunteer roster for the sake of it—we find that we actually make up the body of Christ as a group. The world is made up of fractals—wherein large shapes are made up of smaller ones, which have the very same shape and structure, only in miniature. Break up a cauliflower for example and you find that its broken up parts are but replicas of the image of the whole. Each floret is itself a mini cauliflower.

There are enough fractals in creation to guess that God enjoys them, and so in one sense each person is a mini-Christ, each community the body of Christ, and all parts of a whole that as John says in his epistle: “when we see Him, we shall be like Him.” The promise is that God can and does work through us the continuing ministry of Christ and Christ’s ongoing life. To that end we each have our part to play. The trick is to learn to recognize this in each other; and to know that the gifts in a given person or community might change over the years, and adapt accordingly.

And so God invites us to dedicate ourselves to this purpose—to lay our lives on the altar of thanksgiving as Paul refers to it in Romans 12. We offer ourselves as living sacrifices—our time, our energies, our minds, our hearts—all offered to God. We are thus called and chosen; it is a matter of vocation not volunteerism.

The other part of this promise is that the gifts for mission are also present beyond those we currently recognize within the church community. They are in the people in Maquoketa and surrounding towns. They are in the people with whom you share your gratitude for life and the wisdom you are receiving from living with God. The other day I heard that Christian mission requires four actions—feed, teach, heal and raise the dead! This is what Jesus did and it is what Jesus continues to do through us. Now I can hear you saying, “Well three out of four isn’t bad!” We’ve just fed more than 400 people; and we regularly pray for healing; we teach at Sunday school. But it is that fourth thing that is the clincher—the raising of the dead! What about the bringing back to life of people who have lost their way? Of those who have forgotten or never known why they are alive, or have not known the joy of being alive? Help them back to a God who starts over, and you have raised the dead. That is what you did with your Rectory. You let it, as a space, die and be demolished; only to be raised from the dead as you built the new community center. So hear God’s further call to do the same for the people around you—friends, family, neighbors, strangers.

The promise is a beautiful community for God where love flourishes and resistance is overcome by love.

Finally, Jesus promises that we are more than servants, but friends. It is His holy work we are asked to do, called to do—and He will never leave us in the dark about it. He has chosen us from the start, even if we think that we had chosen Him. “Cradle Episcopalian” makes no sense to Jesus Christ. We can never get ahead of Him, as He is there choosing us from the beginning. So why bother entering into a resistant identity wrestling match with God? Hear God’s call and yield to it.

So we return to Moses and realize, as Moses did, that we are not left alone by God to do God’s work alone. As a priest, as a Church, as a bishop, as a diocese, we have to learn to do more together, committing a certain proportion of our time and energy to help each other beyond our local concerns. Kent has done this beautifully through the years, coming from Dubuque and sharing his time with you, as he has helped bring you to this point. We rarely share ministry regionally, and so we don’t know how it might look or what vitality it might create. We rarely share it ecumenically, but if not now, when?

The promise is before us. Lift up your hearts and give thanks. With God all things are possible—old things are being made new—and this congregation has been here a long time. Many of you have given large parts of your lives to this place. Throughout, the God who has yet begun a good work in you now seeks yet again to direct, strengthen and uphold you in the service of God’s Kingdom. With Moses we stand back, and we let the Spirit of God fall upon us all, calling God’s fully equipped and fully gifted children to action with Christ as His chosen friends.     

                                                                                                                Amen   

Reflections on visitation to St Paul’s Durant—9 March 2014

Darwin’s principles were claimed to be alive and well in the life of St Paul’s Durant  as one member claimed that “survival of the fittest” was at work in their ability to move forward from the split that almost cost them their existence a couple of years ago. Today, sitting in a newly refurbished fellowship hall, which is a symbol of their intent to be a witness to God’s work to make all things new, the Senior Warden presented to me their 2014 Mission Plan. It is an outstanding use of the Diocesan plan as a framework. So much so that I am sharing it with you here. 

“Is this something we should put up on Iowa Share?” someone asked. The question alone was a delight to my ears, because it meant that they were paying attention to our hopes to make IowaShare.org the vehicle for inter-connectedness across the Diocese. You will find St Paul's Durant's 2014 Plan under the "Success Stories" tab at IowaShare.org.

St Paul’s Durant was the only congregation in Iowa to hold a referendum on whether to stay within the Diocese of Iowa or become part of a breakaway that called itself the Anglican Church in North America. The referendum did not get the super majority vote which was needed for the congregation as a whole to move out, but more than two-thirds of the congregation, including most of the younger families, set up a church in a local lawyer’s office, and are now situated in their own space. Support from members of the East Chapter, and individual work by Susanne Watson Epting and Pat Kirkland in developing new leaders among the laity, helped keep them focused on recovery. The pain of the split remains because this is a small community and people see each other in their daily lives. One outstanding effort is D.U.C.K.Y. —Durant’s United Churches for Kids and Youth—a ministry to young people that continues to this day, with teachers from each church in town, including the two communities from the Episcopal split, taking turns.

Thanks also to the faithfulness of grandparents in bringing their grandchildren to church with them, the congregation is enjoying the sounds and energy of children once again. In fact, I have begun to call out the grandparents for special attention in my recent visits, especially in the smaller congregation. Just like Lois of old, Timothy’s grandmother, these are the quiet evangelists and disciplers of a new generation. They may have lost the company of their own children in church for now, but they attempt to introduce their children’s children to the faith and rituals of the Church. We spoke a bit about faith development and mission opportunity as older people during our fellowship time. Faith development and opportunity doesn’t stop in the mid-fifties. As a relatively new senior myself, I am very aware of my own faith’s development, the fresh perspectives God brings to me and the constant challenge of new mission.

It was a blessed time at St Paul’s. They acknowledged that they probably could not bring anyone to the Anthony Robinson Baptismal Living Day Conference on April 5^th, but they had ordered his book and were intending to study it together. Alice Haugen, their priest in residence, has been a wonderful presence among them. On the wall of the fellowship hall is a large flat-screen TV, which is linked to a video camera in the church. They use the TV for recording and relaying baptisms and weddings, and hope, in the future, to record audio and potentially video of Mother Alice’s sermons. The services can be transmitted elsewhere beyond the Church. In other topics discussed they spoke of bringing a speaker on Human Trafficking into town, and I was able to share some of the things going on with that ministry, especially the new work going on in visiting women in jail and finding out more of the story of trafficking from their experience.

Donna and I brought visitors with us in Bishop Meshack Mabuza and Lucy. I had asked if he could bring Lucy to an event on Saturday evening to celebrate the ministry of Deacon Melody Rockwell, and arrange to stay over the weekend so we could enjoy one another’s company. Donna and Lucy had not seen each other since the Healing Mission around Iowa almost ten years ago. They drove back to Des Moines after the service in Durant, and I stayed in the area for the celebration of new ministry of Lauren Lyon and the people of Trinity Iowa City. I also took the opportunity to nip down to Mount Pleasant and pray with Fr. Gary Coldwell who is in a nursing home there.  The Trinity celebration must have been a great encouragement for their new Rector as the place was packed with lots of excited and enthusiastic people representing every generation. There was good support from Chapter clergy as well as a couple of others from Grinnell, Cedar Falls/Waterloo, Burlington, Davenport and Dubuque. This is the second time in a row I have seen the former Rector return to welcome and support the incoming Rector. In fact, it was good to see Mel and Barbara Schlachter on Saturday night at Cedar Rapids and on Sunday afternoon.  

The weekend began with the Diocesan Board meeting at the Cathedral in Des Moines. There we heard testimony and a challenge from Kim Gee of St John’s Shenandoah on investing more energy and resources into our rural churches. She called for a Rural Summit, and I was glad to be able to tell her that an invitation along those lines was “in the mail” with the visit of Anthony Robinson. It also seemed a fitting bookend discussion for the weekend, as I traveled home from Durant via Iowa City, and thought we should get the people of St John’s to meet with the people of St Paul’s.

Sermon at St Paul's Episcopal Church, Durant, 9 March 2014 

Genesis 2: 15-17, 3: 1-7; Romans 5: 12-29; Matthew 4: 1-11

I love Rowan Williams’s description of how original sin entangles us. He likens it to the country roads in Wales. In contrast to the roads of Iowa where apart from one little corner in the central north east, you cannot really get lost—miss a turn and you can probably take the next turn and get back on the road you missed—in Wales the roads are likely to head off in all directions. There is no certainty of a road returning back on itself.  Miss a turn and take the next one offered and soon you might find yourself in a twisting web of roads all seemingly having minds of their own.

Sin, says Williams, is a lot like that. It might start with a simple mistake but there is no certain self- correcting mechanism. One thing leads to another and soon it becomes a tangled web of deception or self-deception. Finding our way forward reminds me of the tourist who stopped in a local village and asked the way to Torquay.  “Yes, I know the way to Torquay,” said the local, “but I wouldn’t go there from here.”

The conversation between God and Adam and Satan and Eve is intriguing. God said, enjoy fruit from every tree except one. In turn Satan said, God doesn’t want you to eat of that one because He says you will die—you won’t die. God knows and is afraid that you will become like God, knowing good and evil. Your eyes will be opened and God wants to keep you dependent on God’s guidance and wisdom. He denies you your freedom.

And so they eat. They disobey and indeed their eyes are opened, but what do they see? Their first awareness is not about good and evil, but about their nakedness. They see that they are different and they feel shame. The difference they perceive is not between good and evil, but about each other. Theologically we call that the alienation of sin. They covered up from each other and they hid from God. And God’s response was reconciliation.

 Looking at the Genesis reading, I remembered a bible study with the people of Trinity Ottumwa in which we studied this passage. I learned an important lesson from the people of Trinity in that when I allowed the text to speak to them, amazing insights would flow from them; but one night I directed their thinking with a simple but pointed question, inviting them to see what I was seeing, and they were left not looking for God’s revealing, but my insight. Fortunately the Genesis passage was not one of those nights. And that night we realized together that simply having the power of knowledge, even of good and evil, was insufficient without the wisdom of knowing what to do with it. That is where God wanted to play a part. It was not about dependence, but about partnership.

We can do all kinds of remarkable things but we do not always know the true impact of our actions’ significance. We can split atoms—but then we decide to turn that knowledge into a weapon of mass destruction and planetary threat. We can create a system of estimating value—but then we decide to use that system for individual competition and domination of one another. This, in turn, translates into the realm of international relations. And we fail to recognize the artificial definition of identity that has arisen as we limit ourselves to a community of nations based on the value of capital.

As with Adam and Eve, we cannot get over our awareness of difference. Alienation becomes a new power and creates a new blindness as it holds us in its grip. “Can’t we all get along,” was the cry at the heart of the 1990s riots in Los Angeles. “No,” is the answer. We simply cannot, for we are too aware of our differences. Even good people of faith are still pretty clear why “those others,” whoever they may be, are not going to heaven! The important cry through the ages is this, from the end of the seventh chapter of Romans, “Who can deliver us from this body of death?” Paul goes on to say, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Contrasting with the imagery of the Welsh roads, we join in with the prophets like Isaiah who declare God’s promise that God makes the crooked roads straight, and creates a highway to our God.

Yes—by one man’s disobedience and unrighteousness, severe consequences have taken hold of us. Our eyes were opened but we could only see the surface of things. And yet, by one man’s obedience and righteousness, light and life have come. In the ancient days baptism was called “enlightenment” for precisely for this reason. It opened our eyes to the true light, to things in their profound context and reconciled relation to each other and to God. It was understood that baptism brought about the effective power of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ to bring forgiveness of our sins and the cleansing of our past and Adam’s past; and our eyes were opened again. We are not only born again, we see again, but this time in the accompanying light of Jesus Christ.

He guides us to see beyond the differences—in Him there is no male or female—and helps us capture the unity of all things and of all people. (Again, this has implications for the use of scientific discovery, the development of international relations and the deployment of financial systems, but how rarely we dare go there). If we allow it, innocence is returned to us, and a kind of unselfconsciousness that only comes from being focused on or conscious of God.

This enlightenment is a new awareness that will always be tempted or tested. God not only allows that but also insists on it. Jesus was declared the beloved in whom God was well pleased only to immediately be sent into the wilderness—led by the Spirit—to be tempted by Satan.

All the physical tests of relevance (making bread from stone), celebrity (jumping from the Temple and dazzling people with His power) and domination (ruling all He could see) were countered by the written Wisdom of the Unseen One who gives sight. “It is written,” Jesus said in response, using Scripture to go beyond the surface challenges and to take the conversation into a deeper place. He invites us to follow Him in the same way; he invites us to receive a new way of looking at things ever sharpened in the midst of temptation and distraction, by the Presence within us of the Wisdom and Teaching of the Living Word of God.  He always sees to the heart of things and not its surface; He sees that we are all made to be One for we come from the One God and Creator of all things. And He invites us to a new way of having our eyes truly opened.

                                                                                                                                                                  Amen  

Sermon on the occasion of celebrating new ministry with Lauren Lyon at Trinity, Iowa City,

9 March 2014 

Numbers 11: 16-17; Romans 12:1-8; John 15: 9-16

    

Looking over this crowded congregation, I would say that I am very impressed if it wasn’t for Spring Forward! [Note: This sermon was given on the first day of Daylight Saving Time when clocks were turned forward one hour.] But I am sure that most of you are enjoying your second trip to Church today. What a joy for your new Rector to receive this support and be lifted by this sense of excitement. I would add how grateful I am for the tone being set in our liturgy as well. Jim Collins— the business theorist—speaks of the significance of the Flywheel Effect. Good companies become great because of their consistent persistence on a theme. They find the product they produce well, and stick with it. People come and go, but the wheel of their productive identity keeps spinning, and with it the growth of their prosperity.

I am struck by the contrast of behaviors when we consider the Church. Too many times even when a congregation has a good sense of ministry direction and the wheel is spinning fast, they will slow it down to a stop just to wait and see what the new Rector wants to do. We then let him or her give the first next push, but momentum has been lost. Sometimes it is a push in the same direction, other times it changes direction, but one way or another the momentum of mission has been slowed; the flywheel is stopped.

I sense none of that here today. That is both a credit to your leadership in the transition and to Ben Webb who served with you as Interim Rector. And so to all of you I say that you together, with your new Rector, have been called—and called to nothing new. You are called because you are chosen just as you chose Lauren and called her—to do the will of God and know together the joy of Jesus in all its completeness.

The flywheel has not been slowed; rather your Rector has come alongside you, having interviewed you even as she was being interviewed, and having chosen you even as you were choosing her. In this mutual act of discerning prayer you both decided that this is the people whose zeal for God is worth working with. I hope you took my advice of a couple of weeks ago and took Lauren by the arm as she entered the building and invited her to “come and join us as we go out to serve God and God’s beloved creation beyond this place.” The flywheel is still going round fast.

According to your reading in Romans, there is specific work for each of us to do in this. And perhaps Lauren’s work is the more obvious piece, because you have already defined a pretty steady place for her in the community. She is, after all, a priest— she gathers the people around God’s altar, and together in various other places—and points to the source of our deeper life. She may, however, have particular gifts beyond this general calling to which she was ordained, and as a baptized member of Christ’s body I urge you to give her room to offer them. This, I think, is the missing link in baptismal ecclesiology, a link which would prevent pitting clergy with laity which can often seem to happen among those who urge that ministry is a product of all the baptized— which, by the way, it is. The ordained, however, are also the baptized and their specific call to ordained ministry has come from that source. But they also have specific passions and gifts of the Spirit to offer as the baptized which they would offer if ordained or not. And we should invite that gift to be offered and I hope you will do so with your new Rector.

Lauren knows that her job is to place as many of you as she can within the tent of the Holy One, as Numbers indicates, and to pray for the Spirit of God to come upon you all in sharing the call to leadership, of caring, of wisdom and guidance and empowerment. It is important for us all to try out what gifts God has within us. Again, Collins speaks of great organizations as those who get the right people on the bus. It does not matter where the journey actually takes you, the right people can adapt and remain productive, even be interchangeable, wherever the bus takes you.

As Church we tend to think that one structure fits all. If it was good enough for the Church of the eighteenth century to have certain guilds or offices or committee structure then it is good enough and essential on our part to replicate it. And we do this regardless of the Spirit’s gifts of the people in our time. So we seek volunteers—even if we have to squeeze the proverbial square peg in the round hole—when instead we should be seeking vocations. Vocations are not only reserved for ordained ministry, but also include all the baptized. We should be free to assess at any given time who is called or on whom do we perceive a call, and then devise the system or structure around the gifts presented for a given time. This is how the Church is renewed. This is how the prayer we so wonderfully prayed as our collect today is fulfilled in which we thanked God for God’s Church that wonderful mystery in which things old are being made new, and things cast down are being raised up. The flywheel keeps on turning when we allow room for the Spirit of God to be pushing it, and when we let the shape of our ministry structure follow suit to our giftedness.

Finally, it will not be Lauren’s vision that will lead the way. Vision is also shared—even though it is often a distinct gift of a Rector, though not of every priest, to be “vision people.” They often carry a marked ability to articulate the vision of the whole. It is part of that call to be a person who gathers. The Rector often gathers the various strands from each and every one that make up God’s strategic vision for your mission together. It is part of what comes from standing she they does, at the center of the altar, presiding at the people’s celebration of God’s grace.

Having said that, however, all of us—Lauren included—are asked to hear the words of St John that we haven’t done the choosing, nor have we really done the visioning. For there is One who loves us, who calls us and has chosen us to fulfil God’s purpose in Jesus Christ to make of us, as Christ’s Body, an agency that reconciles the world to God. For this fruitful outcome we are chosen, called and sent.

We do this by the honoring of one another; by not claiming or thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought; by the humble offering of ourselves to God while honoring the blessed offering of our neighbors. All of this is happening among friends—fiends who tell each other what they are going to do. Jesus has no secret agenda and neither should we. We need not fear if we will fit in or have our place in the new arrangement. In the end it is God’s vision and mission Jesus seeks to fulfil through those who are His through baptism. The mission of the Church is about humility—the humility of being a loving people.

Out of Loving, everything else flows—the pastoral care, the healing touch, the exhorting words of sermons and study, the availability for late night conversations and prayers, the celebration of lives lived, the honoring of achievements, the readiness and compassion to meet people with Jesus on the streets, the willingness to look out for those on the margins and to think about those easily forgotten or neglected—all that makes for God’s reconciling mission through you and now through you with your new Rector, Lauren.

Receive such Divine Love, build your life and its structures around it as the gifts it produces present themselves; place yourself in the tent and say together “Come, Holy Spirit, come.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                      Amen